This morning Spanning Partners launched the latest major release of Spanning Salesforce, our service that lets users subscribe to Salesforce.com with RSS. There's so much to talk about I'm going to skip the marketing hoo-ha and get right to what's new.
New Subscription Model
All Spanning Salesforce subscrptions now start with a 30-day free trial, after which the service costs $12.95/month or $129.95/year, adding less than 10% to the cost of a Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition license, and just over 5% to that of an Unlimited Edition license. An Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition license is required to use Spanning Salesforce.
Signup is all done online and takes less than a minute. Payments are handled through PayPal to ensure the utmost security. Companies signing up 10 or more users qualify for a substantial discount and can request to be invoiced.
New Feeds
The number of feeds that comprise Spanning Salesforce has almost tripled, and continues to grow daily. In addition to Leads, Opportunities, and Cases, users can now track Contacts, Tasks, Events, Documents, and Attachments using any RSS reader that supports secure feeds.
See the newly redesigned web site for a complete list of feeds, or subscribe to the OPML file.
New Features
A ton of work has been done under the hood for this release.
To make the system more scalable, substantial optimizations have been made to the system's use of the Salesforce.com Web Services API. The system's core engine has been completely refactored, so new feeds can be quickly added in response to customer demand.
The feeds themselves have been enhanced as well. Spanning Salesforce now supports custom fields so any extensions your organization has added to the basic Salesforce.com object model will be reflected in your feeds. Also, reference fields now contain meaningful names linked directly to the referenced object, so relationships between accounts, contacts, and opportunities are immediately clear.
Finally, the new release adds support for Microsoft's Simple List Extensions (SLE), which provide flexible data sorting and filtering options to SLE-enabled RSS readers.
Feedback
We're constantly looking for ways to make Spanning Salesforce better, so if you have a suggestion please let us know at feedback@spanningpartners.com.
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